If ever you needed confirmation about the lack of common sense in how government departments approach practical problems, then the ongoing debacle of analogue TV signals being switched off is it. The international deadline for this was July 2015. South Africa is a full decade overdue in releasing these useful frequencies to cellular operators. The opportunity losses for the cellular industry are incalculable, brought on by simple incompetence.
Now, with just 67,943 households remaining, the Department of Communications has asked Parliament for another R803 million to finish a job it says they’ve already spent R2 billion on. As the youth text, “WTF?”.
Nearly a billion rand to connect just 68,000 households. It beggars belief, as they say in the classics. The decades-long process, through six ministers of communications, is a “national embarrassment” as the Sunday Times aptly described it.
The government is asking for R803 million to install 67,943 decoders, which equates to R11,818 per household, with R850 going to the installer. What is this wondrous installation that costs R10,968, and what does it do that an e.tv Openview decoder (which costs R800 and includes all three SABC channels) can’t do?
Who does these calculations? The accountants at Nersa?
Not only is this a clear case of a profound lack of common sense, but you have to ask, is the country getting value for money?
You can get Sixty60 to deliver the decoder (R730) while Openview uses the same satellite as MultiChoice DStv (Intelsat 20 in the northeast sky). Such dishes and installations start at around R1,000.
So, for R2,000, a problem-solving small-business owner can save the government about R9,000. Then, those people who no longer receive the very outdated analogue TV signal – and the very outdated, decade-old set-top box – can get a satellite signal. All you need is a DStv satellite dish.
You don’t even need Eskom, as we all discovered in the (literally) dark days of #LoadShitting. There’s a glut of power stations sitting in warehouses all over the country since the bottom (literally) fell out of that backup power market last year.
When you see pie-in-the-sky, throw-money-at-the-problem thinking like this, you wonder why there isn’t a common-sense supervisor for the country. A sort of director-general of common sense. A non-aligned career diplomat who runs the rule over government plans or tenders for these often obvious (to anyone not in government) problems.
I envisage Hugh Lawrie as the acerbic Doctor House, sarcastically dismantling these proposals with a verbal tongue-lashing in Parliament. But I suspect that is merely liberal wish-fulfilment that such idiocracy would be punished with sharp wit for the enjoyment of us downtrodden citizens standing in home affairs queues.
One can only dream of such justice, but, as always with civil servants, they will escape without as much as a Houseian dressing-down.
The questions this common-sense DG could ask are not things like “how did you think you’d get away with awarding a police tender to the Tembisa tender don Vusimusi Matlala” but “how did you think you would not get caught?”
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South Africans have learnt a long time ago that appealing to the ANC and its deployed cadres’ sense of what’s right is a lost cause. The rest of the country knows this, but the ruling party just doesn’t. They need someone to point out the most obvious and venal of their underhanded patronage in a language that they understand. Sadly, for the tjatjarag class, it won’t be hilariously Houseian (TM), nor will it ever happen.
As has often been repeated in South Africa, the best disinfectant for corruption is sunlight. Luckily, we live in an age of access to information like no other – and sadly, as much disinformation and hate-mongering. Who turns children’s cartoons into kiddie porn? It beggars belief.
The owners of social networks drop content moderation, allowing misinformation and child porn to go wild, because it costs too much to check everything your users post – and the president of the United States has given all his Tech Bros a free pass. The real problem is that the internet companies that publish user-generated content are shielded by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. This is the get-out-of-jail-free card that Silicon Valley’s elite firms have used to get away with two decades of damage to the world’s idea of free speech.
Speech is free – and very profitable – if you’re Big Tech.
The European Union is the only significant force pushing back on this unfettered destruction of people’s privacy and, well, common decency.
No tech CEO would allow their kids to work in the content moderation hubs where the workers often suffer mental distress, PTSD, and other awful side effects from watching the gore and horror of what humans can do to each other. This unspeakable filth is then allowed to run rampant across innumerable social platforms.
Facebook is the “largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally,” said New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez in 2023 when he sued Meta. Remember that the next time your company advertises with Facebook and Instagram.
The company knew that some 100,000 children were using both services and being sexually harassed every day, according to internal documents in another lawsuit filed by Torrez in 2023.
One of them was the 12-year-old daughter of an Apple executive via an Instagram direct message. “This is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App Store,” wrote one Facebook staffer in the internal documents.
As whistleblower Frances Haugen correctly pointed out, the world’s largest social platform prioritises “growth over safety”. Remember that the next time your company advertises with Facebook and Instagram.
The world also needs a common-sense DG.
- This column first appeared on Business Live
